1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital communication system, and more particularly, to a vestigial sideband (VSB) modulation transmission system including a TCM (Trellis-Coded Modulation) encoder and an additional ½ rate convolutional encoder having a superior state transition property when connected to the TCM encoder in the system.
2. Background of the Related Art
The TCM coded 8-VSB modulation transmission system has been selected as a standard in 1995 for the U.S. digital terrestrial television broadcasting, and the actual broadcasting incorporating the system has started since the second half of the year 1998.
In general, a digital communication system performs error correcting processes to correct the errors occurred at the communication channels. The total amount of the transmitting data is increased by such error correcting coding processes since it creates additional redundancy bits added to the information bits. Therefore, the required bandwidth is usually increased when using an identical modulation technique. Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) combines multilevel modulation and coding to achieve coding gain without bandwidth expansion. Also an improved signal to noise ratio can be achieved by using the trellis-coded modulation (TCM) technique.
FIG. 1A and FIG. 1B illustrate a typical TCM encoder used in a typical ATSC 8-VSB system and corresponding set partitions used by the TCM encoder. According to the FIG. 1A, an input bit d0 is output as c1 and c0 after trellis-coded modulation, and then a subset is selected among (−7,1), (−5,3), (−3,5), and (−1,7). Thereafter, an input bit d1 selects a signal within the selected subset. In other words, when d1 and d0 are inputted, one of eight signals (−7, −5, −3, −1, 1, 3, 5, 7) is selected by c2, c1, and c0 generated by the TCM encoder. d1 and d0 are called an uncoded bit and a coded bit, respectively.
FIG. 1B illustrates the set partitions used by the TCM encoder used in the ATSC 8-VSB system. Eight signal levels are divided into four subsets, each of which including two signal levels. Two signals are assigned to each subset such that the signal levels of each subset are as far as possible from each other as shown in FIG. 1B.